


We're All Pieces On Someone Else's Board

by cynicalpoliticsstudent



Category: The Queen's Gambit (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-21
Packaged: 2021-03-13 13:21:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28904061
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cynicalpoliticsstudent/pseuds/cynicalpoliticsstudent
Summary: Beth sorts out her feelings the best way she knows
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	We're All Pieces On Someone Else's Board

Putting down the phone, Beth’s thoughts and feelings rose up to consume her. In a bid to wrangle them in some sort of order, she laid them out like she was setting up a chessboard for a game.

The pawns were feelings of cost, worry, independence, frustration, charmed. None individual, each building to something bigger

The knights were the fleetingness of her thoughts, the bouncing from one thing to another, crossing here and there

Bishops had the pragmatism, the feeling that this wasn’t about her, it was just that they wanted someone to finally beat  Borgov 

The rooks embodying that fierce bright joy that she was going to win tomorrow.

Finally, the Queen. The strongest feeling of all, that they cared. All the people who had, without reason and with serious provocation not to, cared enough to see her through. To take that individualism Benny had told her about and throw it in the trash.

There was one more thought. She wanted to make it a pawn, so that it was less powerful, make her less vulnerable. But it was the King. Benny. The bridge she thought she’d burnt while drinking in Alma’s house. The person she was sure was the originator of the idea in the first place.

Shaking herself from her thoughts, the mental chessboard vanished as she began to lay out the physical pieces for the first variation. She had work to do. 

**Author's Note:**

> So I didn't want the thought of Benny to be the centre of this - the thought of a man being the centre of a woman's thought doesn't exactly come naturally. But I couldn't get the story to come out right without him, so here you go.


End file.
